Retro gaming, data preservation, and open-source software. I'm a maintainer of several open-source retro gaming data preservation projects so go figure lol

What is involved with town mapping - do you have some kind of Google type camera rig on your car or a GPS device that automates the process and just drive through street, or what?

For those who jump around too much like I do, remember:

Trying to learn languages, Linux, gaming, and music.

I just become "good" compared to someone who never tried and then lose interest and try something else.

Puzzles.
And everything is a puzzle to a degree. I love to collect information in my head and use it to solve other things. I used to try to solve them for the cosmos or for the world but I didn't get paid very well to do that and I'd rather just solve little ones.

Be it literal puzzles, trivia, cooking is often a puzzle of balancing flavors and combining them in unique ways. Software and computers are just puzzles on finding how the functions work and solving through it until you find that part that doesn't solve right.

I make my own furniture pieces occasionally or garden. All of it is just puzzle solving for what my soil can grow, what do I need for the household or what can be done with the odds and end items I have left.

It's fun to repurpose items, fix broken things and build new stuff and I bet it's how lots of other people who can't focus on things feel as well. It's just another puzzle.

Urban planning and old architecture. I could spend an entire evening just walking around older neighbourhoods looking at the level of detail put into the buildings

Does raising and training ducks count? I'm really good at it. I have care down to a science and I've done quite a bit medically because there aren't any vets that treat ducks around me. I've rehabilitated crazy injuries, performed minor surgery, treated severe malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies.

I have trained all of my birds to listen to basic commands and they know their names and respond to them.

Hobbies, I have many interests each more important than the last.

I grow bonsai trees.

Low level C programming.

And also I know a lot about breaking video DRM.

Philosophy and some sciences, but I'm not very knowledgeable. I know people say you don't need to be an expert in order to enjoy things, and I agree, but then those aren't special interests either, right? I love my music, but I know few bands. I love singing, but I lack technique. I like horror stuff, but I'm pretty picky. I'd like to be fit and practice sports, but my health is an issue. I like some beauty topics, but I'm not interested in applying them. I enjoy eating, simple food though. Some games are fun, but I mostly repeat the same ones. I like mountains and forests, but just for a day or two. I'd like to read more...

I'm really a master of none.

3d design & printing, electronics, cooking, in-person RPGs, woodworking, old time radio, sci fi, bookbinding, comedy... I got a million of 'em.

I am a spring of knowledge about all of the domestic Real Housewives franchises (though I did just pick up Dubai recently).

I know all the lore behind all their relationships/alliances/enemies and off season shenanigans.

Its legitimately stupid how much I can talk about rich women who flaunt their wealth and then do trashy shit like throw wine in one another's faces or flip tables (or scam the elderly out of their retirement funds to fund their own lifestyle).

Mine is Free software. If I can avoid it, then I avoid nonfree software. This brings me a lot of problems but also a lot of joy.

Hedge laying. It's a technique where you almost cut through the stems of the plants in a hedgerow in order to bend them down. This promotes the growth of new shoots and results in a very dense hedge, which historically was done to make sure animals didn't escape or enter pastures and fields.

Low level coding and free open source software for me mostly.

I've met some people who like to map areas on OpenStreetMap and I'd be interested in trying it myself but like with contributing to anything I'm new to I'm scared of doing something wrong. I understand that with OpenStreetMap there's a sort of discussion of changes like on Wikipedia?

When you started what resources helped you, did a friend show you? Is there a tutorial you recommend for starting off? (If you explained some of this somewhere else please feel free to link to it or tell me, I haven't read through all the comments here yet.)

Gotten real good st troubleshooting fuel injection systems on vintage Italian cars (not the expensive kind)

I have a weird obsession with fonts. I love a good, well designed font. How it looks on the screen, how it looks in print. Nothing too gaudy or showy, but a really good League Spartan or Lato Light. (Not a fan of serifs)

Other than that, normal stuff; 3D modelling, writing, etc...

My other interest that might fall "outside the norm" is that in University, if I had continued beyond my bachelors my primary focus would have been studying the Bronze Age Collapse, and that topic still fascinates me to this day.

Edit: Oh...and spreadsheets. There's no problem in the world that can't be fixed with a well designed spreadsheet. All problems come down to data sorting.

Well thank you very much Emerald for the mapping and the great question.
For me, it's something much more modest:

• Amiga, or retro-computing in general. Not just for gaming. There's something deeply inspiring about browsing the web or creating spreadsheets with entirely different hardware and software. Hoping to get an Alpha CPU and/ or an Atari soon.
• Dreaming of a better world.

For awhile there it was light sport aviation. I'm a CFI-SP and an LSRM-A. I'm a walking flight school, just add airplane. Been out of the game awhile but that was my specialty for much of my 20's.

I know more about the Doom engine than I do interpersonal relations. Did you know you can completely destroy collision physics via writing over memory addresses if you shoot a bullet weapon at a stack of corpses?

Edit to explain: Decino has a great video explaining it in detail. Link is above, tho I'm at work and can't watch it to double check. Poorly explained from my memory:

When you fire a hitscan attack (press button, gun shoots a bullet that instantly hits with no travel time), the engine does a number of checks for collision, range, etc. If you have a stack of actors (decorations, monsters, ammo, etc) and you fire a hitscan attack in the direction of the stack, it makes a call to check collision for each individual actor in that stack. The actors don't have to be all on top of each other, it just matters that the hitscan line crosses over those actors.

If you have a stack of 129 or more actors and fire a hitscan weapon, the game will essentially overwrite parts of the memory address. I don't understand a lick of that stuff myself, admittedly, I'm no programmer. If you have something around ~140ish actors in the line of fire of a hitscan attack, the Blockmap system for checking collision effectively gets erased. Projectiles pass through everything, bullets and melee do no damage, players and monsters walk through walls, and you can't interact with things like switches. You can fix it by saving and loading, though if you're recording demos you can't save.

iNaturalist

i upload photos i take of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, fungi, and bugs. The observations (photos + location + annotation) are uploaded to a public database accessible to researchers and universities.

I've been involved in multiple species range expansions, and i've documented both endangered and invasive species. Pretty fun!

The Android app is very good. The iOS app is good for uploads, but lacks a lot of browsing features like search filters and phylogenetic trees. If you are on iOS i suggest using it in a browser except for observation uploads

You can also upload audio recordings for bird and bug sounds. It's amazing what you can learn about your local ecosystem!

Picking up new hobbies, investing in them far beyond what would be considered a casual interest, then getting bored or disillusioned with the community after 6-24 months.

See

• Foam dart blasters
• yo yos
• magic the gathering (This was like 15 years)
• coin collecting
• juggling
• pocket knives
• archery
• running
• Currently working on 3D printing, though that's been more of a means to get back into foam blasters because it's far cheaper to print your own blasters and mod parts.